A sudden stop

You awaken as the train comes to a stop. It takes a moment for your eyes to focus. You can see that outside the train that the urban landscape is long gone, replaced with rolling hills and little farmsteads of the countryside. Snow still hides in the hollows of the hills, but where the sun has melted the snow away on the hilltops there are clumps of grass poking up from the brown and unplowed earth. Checking your phone you see that it is just past midday, just about halfway through your trip home.

Melancholy hits you like a wave. You sigh. Only now does it hit you where exactly you are going. Back home. Back to your childhood home. Back to your “hometown.” You feel your lips curl into a frown with that word.

You put the thoughts of growing up in a podunk town out in the middle of the prairie out of your mind, it will only make you more annoyed and upset. Instead you think forwards to seeing your family again.

“Eh.” You grumble. That’s not a particularly happy thought either. You go back to staring out the window. There’s a honk of a horn and you watch as a freight train crawls by on the opposite track. You start counting: one, two, three, four―

175 train cars, three locomotives, and many many minutes later the freight train’s last car snail crawls past your window. You sigh. You feel another thunk as your train starts to move again, picking up speed and passing through the rocks and rills of the countryside. That was a nice distraction, therapeutic to your anxious soul for as long as it lasted. But you feel your feet getting itchy, your legs uncomfortable from all this sitting and decide that it's best you get up and do something.